Rubin, who’s representing himself at his drug trial, says members of his Temple 420 believe that marijuana is the tree of life mentioned in the Bible.

Though ordained in 1990 by the Universal Life Church, police and prosecutors describe Rubin as a drug dealer. He faces up to seven years in prison if convicted of possessing marijuana for sale.

The 41-year-old Rubin has no legal experience, and says he spent last weekend praying and smoking marijuana with Indians in a sweat lodge at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Judge Shira Scheindlin said that granting class action status was the only way to stop the state-wide enforcement of an anti-begging law that was ruled unconstitutional in 1992, but since then has been used in over 10,000 arrests and prosecutions across the entire state.

"We're looking forward to putting an end to this practice," said Matthew Brinckerhoff, the beggars' lawyer.

The city lawyers had contended that the plaintiffs were unfit to represent such a large group in a class action suit, due to mental illness and drug addiction.

A court has ruled that the government of California is within its rights to prohibit Adidas from selling kangaroo-hide soccer shoes in the state.

U.S. law does not pre-empt a state law banning importation and sale of kangaroo products in California, the California State Supreme Court ruled Monday. It reversed two lower-court decisions that sided with Adidas's argument that the California law could not foreclose U.S. provisions that allow the use of the Australian kangaroo hides.

Adidas recently began one of its largest U.S. advertising campaigns. The promotions feature David Beckham, who recently joined the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team.

"Although Adidas makes some shoes using kangaroo leather, a common practice in our industry, Adidas does not make shoes from any endangered or threatened kangaroo species," a company spokeswoman, Andrea Corso, said in a statement. "We are confident that we will prevail in this matter."

Beckham's soccer shoe is made with a synthetic leather upper, Corso said.

The United States lifted a ban in 1981 on imports of leather from the three kangaroo species that Adidas uses for the shoes. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1995 took those species off its endangered or threatened species list, effectively ending the U.S. government's involvement in the matter, the California court said.

The case was brought by Viva, the Vegetarian International Voice for Animals. The California Supreme Court sent the case back to the appeals court to decide whether Viva had standing to bring the case under California law and whether the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution prohibited California from trying to regulate kangaroo imports, said an Adidas lawyer, Martin Fineman.

A California man has been charged by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles with operating an Internet-based obscenity distribution business and related offenses, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney George Cardona of the Central District of California announced today.

The indictment returned yesterday charges Ira Isaacs, doing business as Stolen Car Films and LA Media, with four counts of using an interactive computer service to sell and distribute obscene films on DVD, two counts of using a common carrier to distribute obscene DVDs, and two counts of failing to label sexually explicit DVDs with the name and location of the custodian of records containing age and identification information for performers in sexually explicit films. The maximum penalty is five years in prison on each count.

The court will issue a summons directing Isaacs, who is believed to reside in the Hollywood Hills, to appear in United States District Court in Los Angeles for arraignment in August. The indictment also seeks the forfeiture of all obscene materials produced and transported by Isaacs and any proceeds derived from the sale of such materials.

The charges contained in the indictment are merely accusations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

The case is being prosecuted by Trial Attorney Kenneth Whitted of the Justice Department’s Obscenity Prosecution Task Force and Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. The Task Force was formed to focus on the prosecution of adult obscenity nationwide. The investigation was conducted by the FBI’s Adult Obscenity Squad, a national initiative of the FBI based in the Washington, D.C. Field Office, and agents from the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office.

Fliers posted on trees in the burned area also urge residents to mount a lawsuit against the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, which enforces environmental regulations in the Lake Tahoe Basin.

Some Tahoe residents have blamed the agency for the fire, saying the agency's regulations aimed at preserving the clarity of the lake made it difficult to clear pine needles, trim brush and cut trees around properties to create defensible space.

In the subdivision damaged in the Angora fire, an assessment found that 19 percent to 34 percent of the homes had created defensible space.

Larry Parker, the personal injury lawyer cited in the television ads, did not return a telephone call by the Associated Press to his Long Beach office Tuesday seeking comment.

The Reno Gazette-Journal reported that the firm sent the newspaper an e-mail Monday that said the firm "has represented over 100,000 injury victims during the past 30 years and recovered over $750,000,000 for its clients."

Tahoe Regional Planning Agency officials said they've seen the ads and the fliers but haven't received any notification of legal action. The agency says it relaxed tree-cutting policies in recent years and can't be blamed for the blaze.

"We've tried to convey clearly that most defensible-space work is possible under existing rules," said Julie Regan, agency spokeswoman.

"If you look at the work that's been done in Incline Village, it's been done under the same rules as the South Shore," she told the newspaper.

"It's unfortunate that some businesses and attorneys are trying to take advantage of this community by using scare tactics."

Agency regulations say: "Leave the 'duff' layer of pine needles in your yard -- do not rake them all up. The 'duff' layer is the dark area at the ground level where the pine needles are decomposing. This matter does not burn easily."

Other residents said they didn't want agency inspectors on their property because they fear they will be cited for violations of the agency's erosion-control measures.

That fear creates a "paralysis" among homeowners who want to make changes on their property, residents and fire experts said last month.

Agency officials say the regulations weren't responsible for the blaze but are open to changes.

"We have been open to amending policies and ordinances in an effort to better address fire safety at Lake Tahoe," John Singlaub, the agency's executive director, said. "Following the Angora fire, a robust community debate is in order to help prevent such a catastrophic event from occurring in the future."

"The saga of Global Money Management demonstrates once again that fraudsters can steal money using e-mails, letters and stock solicitations rather than guns," Halpern said. "We must be vigilant for this type of fraud, which causes so much harm to so many."

Two other people indicted in the case – GMM fund co-manager Marvin Irwin Friedman and bookkeeper Alice Mae Swiderski – previously pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.

In his plea agreement, Levy admitted diverting up to $7 million in GMM investor money to entities he controlled for his own personal use. He also filed false tax returns for the years 2001, 2002 and 2003 that resulted in a tax loss to the government of about $2.3 million, according to court documents.

Beginning in at least 1997, Levy and Friedman solicited investors through word of mouth, referrals from family members and, later, by soliciting institutional investors through referrals from investment banking firms, according to court documents.

Levy and Friedman touted the successful performance of the GMM hedge fund, claiming it was making substantial returns that averaged 25 percent annually. The partners also claimed not to charge any fees for managing the fund but instead to receive a share of profits generated by the GMM fund.

Prosecutors alleged the hedge fund was little more than a Ponzi scheme, in which the two men used new investor funds to pay off longer-term investors in an attempt to induce those individuals to invest more in the fund. The partners also diverted funds to pay their personal expenses and to benefit other corporate entities they controlled.

Global Money Management collapsed in March 2004, shortly after the Securities and Exchange Commission sued GMM, its general partner LF Global Investments and controlling director Friedman for securities fraud.

At the urging of the SEC, a judge froze the partnership's assets and turned GMM over to court-appointed receiver Charles La Bella. At the time, La Bella found less than $50,000 in assets in the partnership, which once purported to control $116 million on behalf of about 200 investors.

In earlier court documents, prosecutors said La Bella traced more than $18 million in investor funds to accounts controlled by Levy, including at least one account in Switzerland.

Halpern said the government now believes it has recovered any money that wasn't "dissipated" by partners Levy and Friedman.

Ronald Krajewski, acting assistant special agent in charge for the San Diego office of the Internal Revenue Service, said the agency, which investigated the case with the Department of Justice, will "aggressively pursue" individuals who take financial advantage of clients and evade their income taxes.

"Investment professionals who have betrayed their clients' trust and placed their own personal monetary gain ahead of their clients' financial well-being will be prosecuted," Krajewski said.

The court found that the agency, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, a unit of the Department of Transportation, had ignored the results of a database it commissioned to catalog more than 50,000 truck accidents from 1991 to 2002. Using the data, the study extrapolated that the risk of fatigue-related accidents would be substantially higher in the extra hours of service allowed by the new rules.

“F.M.C.S.A. failed to provide an adequate explanation for its decision to adopt the 11-hour daily driving limit,” the court said.

The new rules had been adopted after heavy lobbying by politically connected leaders of the trucking industry. The changes were part of the broader strategy by the Bush administration to reduce regulations on businesses.

Safety experts and insurance analysts challenged the changes. They said longer driving hours have contributed to the high number of truck accidents. About 100 people die each week in truck-related accidents, making trucking America’s most treacherous industry as measured by overall deaths and injuries.

Supporters of the loosened standards say they have made it faster and cheaper to move goods across the country. They say the changes promote safety because shorter hours would force the industry to put more drivers with little experience behind the wheel. And they note that the fatality rate, or the number of deaths per miles traveled, has continued a long decline.

Still, the fatality rate for truck-related accidents remains nearly double that involving only cars. And the Bush administration has repeatedly missed its own targets for reducing the number of fatalities from truck accidents.

The decision today came in a case filed by Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group. It was the third time in three years that the courts have been critical of the motor carrier agency.

A different appeals panel criticized the agency in December 2005 for failing to issue adequate rules for the training of drivers, saying the agency had ignored its own studies on the need for more comprehensive training.

And in 2004, a third panel of the appeals court struck down virtually identical new hours of service rules as the ones at issue in Tuesday’s decision, saying that they had been “arbitrary and capricious.”

After Congress, at the urging of the Bush administration and the trucking industry, intervened to block the enforcement of the 2004 court order, the motor carrier agency issued the 2005 rules. At the time, the agency said it had addressed the concerns raised by the appeals court’s 2004 decision.

In a regulatory impact analysis accompanying the 2005 changes, the agency concluded that the economic costs to the industry of tightening the hours of service rules, as consumer groups had proposed, outweighed the safety benefits.

But the court said today that analysis was flawed. The opinion was written by Judge Merrick B. Garland and signed by Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg and Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson.

Safety groups hailed Tuesday’s ruling and said the court had confirmed their view that the agency had failed to adequately justify relaxing the rules.

“The court is saying once again, no,” said Jacqueline S. Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, an alliance of consumer, health and insurance organizations. “For three and a half years this agency has tried every which way to defend a rule that would result in longer consecutive driver hours and longer total work hours. This has a dramatic dangerous impact on the lives of truck drivers and on the lives of everyone sharing the roads with trucks. And once again the court has said, ‘No, you cannot go ahead with a rule when it violates the law and you clearly have not justified it.’ ”

The agency would not say whether it would appeal the decision or seek a stay of the court’s order, which is set to go into effect in September.

“We are analyzing the decision issued today to understand the court’s findings as well as determine the agency’s next steps to prevent driver fatigue, ensure safe and efficient motor carrier operations and save lives,” said a statement issued by the agency.

The American Trucking Associations, which defended the changes to the rules in the proceeding, said they would ask the court to stay its ruling to give the agency time to provide a better justification of the changes.